The Beta Complaint Mega Thread

[Takyon3]

Let's get to it.





Loyalism

Non-existent in both the initial launch and the beta, which is worrying. Apparently a few characters have received T1 and T2 loyalism because they participated in the work cycles, but that doesn't mean anything because loyalists don't get perks yet. I think it was a big mistake not introducing a proper loyalty system here in the beta, but I digress. I could go on about how to make loyalty appealing to the average player but that's another thread in of itself, so I'll leave it. I just want to see it on the actual launch.

CPs

There was a thread already made about this, you can find it here: https://willard.network/forums/threads/loyalist-rp-is-underwhelming-when-cp-display-inaction.1757/

CPs just go on patrols and berate people who confront them directly. They act very passively until an admin gives them the go ahead to gun down people during riots. What can I say? They're not bad by any means, and they're not good either. They seem to be there for the sake of hl2rp, and they have no goals of their own other then the enforcement of the status quo (which is passive rp and work rp by the way). They don't seem to employ any sort of tactics with how they control the population of the city, and they seem to think going on the odd patrol every now and then is enough. It's disappointing how bland and passive they are. No one is afraid of them, they are a laughing stock honestly and are mocked constantly without remorse.

CCA

The CCA, like the CPs, have no real authority over the population and its various departments are disconnected. CCA members have no access to their own office (lol) which is the same issue they had on the initial release. They really don't have anything to do other then the one or two people that make generic as fuck broadcasts. The CCA has no communication with the CPs, as @Gr4Ss said here.




No one really knows who the CA is. His character and broadcasts are not very memorable and he himself, like the CPs and the CCA, exercises no initiative to do or change any aspect of the city. It wouldn't surprise me if he was disconnected from the CCA as well.

Housing, Food, Work

Housing Is non-existent. Generally, people have an aspiration to acquire a house as they join a hl2rp server, or work for one and buy one with money. Citizens are relegated to the ration terminal building where they sleep in bunks. This whole bunk thing makes sense considering the theme of the beta, but acquiring an apartment should have been something to earn from the get go. What are the citizens even working for anyway? Food and Water is useless as you do not die from starvation or dehydration. I have brought this point up before, and the community managers are very keen not to introduce death by starvation on the server for one reason or another. In my opinion, it removes yet another thing to do. So citizens can't get a house, they don't need food and water, so what is their incentive to work? They have none. this lack of foresight for something so obvious is a big red flag for the actual launch of the server.

You can avoid work, not eat or drink, you can do nothing and you will survive this so called "dystopia". People NEED a drive otherwise the server will stagnate. People seem to forget the initial launch stagnated quite a bit before they had to pull the plug.

TL;DR​

Everything feels disconnected and isolated from each other. The CCA doesn't do much, the CPs are bog standard, maybe even sub-par, and patrolling is the most you'll see them do. Citizens work without incentive. Loyalism is not in. Housing is not in. Food and water is useless. Work rp for two weeks was a bad idea, but it had potential.

 

[Equinox]

Perhaps a partial rule should be made that states that admins cannot partake in the events they create, or run, nor can they spawn items for themselves. Instead, they have to find players who are willing to take part in them. Either characters that players may be willing to lose (not for certain, just a risk. certain death should be elaborated on by the admin creating it), or event characters that are ran by players who have volunteered to take part as event characters. It's just a spitball, but perhaps it could work.

 

[Imperator RAD-X]

Perhaps a partial rule should be made that states that admins cannot partake in the events they create, or run, nor can they spawn items for themselves. Instead, they have to find players who are willing to take part in them. Either characters that players may be willing to lose, or event characters that are ran by players who have volunteered to take part as event characters. It's just a spitball, but perhaps it could work.

@Sagsworth

 

[Bodger]

Perhaps a partial rule should be made that states that admins cannot partake in the events they create, or run, nor can they spawn items for themselves. Instead, they have to find players who are willing to take part in them. Either characters that players may be willing to lose (not for certain, just a risk. certain death should be elaborated on by the admin creating it), or event characters that are ran by players who have volunteered to take part as event characters. It's just a spitball, but perhaps it could work.

Afaik stuff like that was supposed to be handled by the event team

 

[AdamCF]

i have a solution to all of this
make adamcf an admin

 

[Equinox]

Perhaps a partial rule should be made that states that admins cannot partake in the events they create, or run, nor can they spawn items for themselves. Instead, they have to find players who are willing to take part in them. Either characters that players may be willing to lose (not for certain, just a risk. certain death should be elaborated on by the admin creating it), or event characters that are ran by players who have volunteered to take part as event characters. It's just a spitball, but perhaps it could work.

To tail off this, players should attempt to create their own events that they either suggest to the admin, or try to carry out themselves. In these cases, admins must be willing to place the player's event over their own, at least in that moment, and accomodate them. This is what GMs were for, and I while I understand that GMs were removed due to the issues it caused, the position is kind of important if admins won't have enough time to dedicate to helping the players.

 

[Bodger]

To tail off this, players should attempt to create their own events that they either suggest to the admin, or try to carry out themselves. In these cases, admins must be willing to place the player's event over their own, at least in that moment, and accomodate them. This is what GMs were for, and I while I understand that GMs were removed due to the issues it caused, the position is kind of important if admins won't have enough time to dedicate to helping the players.

@TheDeNuke Maybe wanna get some non staff in here?

 

[Sagsworth]

@Sagsworth

Well todays event was pulled off on a whim, as me and a few other staff were talking about vorts not having caused enough terrorism, and so with the go ahead I went on my vort, got myself some frags and was gonna chuck a few at infrastructure to cause some chaos. Then @Gr4Ss comes up with the idea of firebombing the loyalist housing scaffolding which was *intended* to just hit the loyalist housing before it was complete. Player inaction led to the fire spreading to the CMU which lead to break off fires not caused by my vort in the CWU HQ and CCA building.

It had nothing to do with seeing a player auth for firebombing something and going "fuck it, can't wait for the players we'll do it ourselves!" And personally I had no idea there was a "no fires!" order going about among staff, and I had no idea youwere planning something like this. This was just gonna be a case of a vort bombing some stuff for their faction goal, which turned into what it did because the players didn't do anything about the fire before it spread to the CMU. If they had the CMU, CWU and CCA fires may never have happened.

The whole dynamic of the two week event is for the "loyalist" side to get the district built and for the "resistance" side to stop it being built. Due to how the building mats were handled (needing 40 for a building and 40 coming in for the two trains a day), all buildings were almost complete, meaning the dynamic of the event was about to shift before a week had even passed, which is why things were so hectic. The burning of the loyalist housing was supposed to be a slowing measure so that other actions could be taken later on, without a massive shift to cleaning up the IZ and rebuilding that.

I'm sorry this messed with your plan, if I had known I would have gotten you in on it.

The problem isn't that you maliciously fucked me over or anything, I mentioned in my post that I didn't know how this had been handled in detail. It's that I went through days of clawing my way through CMs and staff to try and get this even authed, and once I had that, no one responded to any of my requests for someone to run the event. And you were able to get this done "on a whim" as you say, because you're on staff and an insider, so by comparison you can effectively do what you want with no pushback immediately.

The thing that makes this even crazier, and I didn't want to call out individuals but you've mentioned him, is that Gr4ss is one of the admins I spoke to who pushed back on this, and one of the people I know was online when I was constantly trying to get this organized and no one responded.

If I had received the auth and been able to do this in the amount of time that it took you to do this, it would have been done on day two of the server. I had plans to sabotage the lift and slow down the movement of supplies, to attack buildings in progress. This was before the CWU building was even built, same goes for the hospital - these could have been delayed. And the delay to the Union side of the event would have been achieved, but instead I got nothing for days on end, until someone on the staff team just decided on a whim "hey lets bomb something haha", and then it was done in seconds. The double standard is insane and infuriating.

Perhaps a partial rule should be made that states that admins cannot partake in the events they create, or run, nor can they spawn items for themselves. Instead, they have to find players who are willing to take part in them. Either characters that players may be willing to lose, or event characters that are ran by players who have volunteered to take part as event characters. It's just a spitball, but perhaps it could work.

Designated game masters moment. Self auths should never be allowed, and to be honest, if something is going to be authed like this, handing it to a player is way more interesting than giving it to a staff member who's already involved in the server.

 

[Bodger]

The problem isn't that you maliciously fucked me over or anything, I mentioned in my post that I didn't know how this had been handled in detail. It's that I went through days of clawing my way through CMs and staff to try and get this even authed, and once I had that, no one responded to any of my requests for someone to run the event. And you were able to get this done "on a whim" as you say, because you're on staff and an insider, so by comparison you can effectively do what you want with no pushback immediately.

And the delay to the Union side of the event would have been achieved, but instead I got nothing for days on end, until someone on the staff team just decided on a whim "hey lets bomb something haha", and then it was done in seconds.

This wasn't a funny haha bomb stuff fun event, it stemmed from the conversation of the global D47 event almost being over. One more train, one more delivery of building materials and the event would be done just like that. What happens after that we don't know, but the action that was decided upon was to delay the construction of the final building. Could your auth have been taken into account? Yes. Could you have gone through with this? Yes. Could a lot of things have been different during the event? Yes.

There's a lot of things I personally don't like with how the server has gone so far. OfC's weren't supposed to be out in force like they have been. RL's weren't supposed to resemble DvL's in their mannerisms and attitudes as much as they do, they were also supposed to train units, which hasn't really happened. The QZ was supposed to be dangerous because of the xen creatures, spores and infection, yet those threats have been replaced with propblocks and filling buildings with turrets.

Things could have been planned properly and taken time to achieve, players could have been involved much much more in how things turned out. However you take this event though, it's fortunately a beta and hopefully with the main server a LOT of these problems will be solved for a much smoother experience that's less frustrating to people.

 

[Merlinsclaw]

Make an event team, get some people who are actually competent and can write events on board.

As for the global HL2RP situation. I do believe the ENGLISH version of HL2RP is dying. Disagree all you want, but I don’t think it’ll be the same as it was 5 years ago. Maybe S&Box will come along, maybe it won’t be like we suspect.

As for the age old dystopia argument and Nebulous. Nebulous is what I’d say is a fairly liberal server on their lore. Nebulous itself goes through cycles of activity, with some being extremely creative and awesome and others being boring text rp times such as the period when it was on C24 (as @Takyon3 pointed out)

I don’t think anyone wants a non-dystopic server. I’ve never heard anyone say that. What I do think people want is a server that is dystopic but not so blatantly boring that you just leave. “Pick up that can” and “ISOLATE” and “no, you can’t have scissors” or your malnourished. It’s lazy, it’s boring. Yet the setting can go so much further with periods of eldritch horror of an inter-deminisonal empire that has human elements essentially chipping away at itself.

tl;dr
Make the dystopian fun and interesting. Make an event team.

 

[Dazor]

Let's get to it.


View attachment 3262


Loyalism

Non-existent in both the initial launch and the beta, which is worrying. Apparently a few characters have received T1 and T2 loyalism because they participated in the work cycles, but that doesn't mean anything because loyalists don't get perks yet. I think it was a big mistake not introducing a proper loyalty system here in the beta, but I digress. I could go on about how to make loyalty appealing to the average player but that's another thread in of itself, so I'll leave it. I just want to see it on the actual launch.

CPs

There was a thread already made about this, you can find it here: https://willard.network/forums/threads/loyalist-rp-is-underwhelming-when-cp-display-inaction.1757/

CPs just go on patrols and berate people who confront them directly. They act very passively until an admin gives them the go ahead to gun down people during riots. What can I say? They're not bad by any means, and they're not good either. They seem to be there for the sake of hl2rp, and they have no goals of their own other then the enforcement of the status quo (which is passive rp and work rp by the way). They don't seem to employ any sort of tactics with how they control the population of the city, and they seem to think going on the odd patrol every now and then is enough. It's disappointing how bland and passive they are. No one is afraid of them, they are a laughing stock honestly and are mocked constantly without remorse.

CCA

The CCA, like the CPs, have no real authority over the population and its various departments are disconnected. CCA members have no access to their own office (lol) which is the same issue they had on the initial release. They really don't have anything to do other then the one or two people that make generic as fuck broadcasts. The CCA has no communication with the CPs, as @Gr4Ss said here.

View attachment 3263


No one really knows who the CA is. His character and broadcasts are not very memorable and he himself, like the CPs and the CCA, exercises no initiative to do or change any aspect of the city. It wouldn't surprise me if he was disconnected from the CCA as well.

Housing, Food, Work

Housing Is non-existent. Generally, people have an aspiration to acquire a house as they join a hl2rp server, or work for one and buy one with money. Citizens are relegated to the ration terminal building where they sleep in bunks. This whole bunk thing makes sense considering the theme of the beta, but acquiring an apartment should have been something to earn from the get go. What are the citizens even working for anyway? Food and Water is useless as you do not die from starvation or dehydration. I have brought this point up before, and the community managers are very keen not to introduce death by starvation on the server for one reason or another. In my opinion, it removes yet another thing to do. So citizens can't get a house, they don't need food and water, so what is their incentive to work? They have none. this lack of foresight for something so obvious is a big red flag for the actual launch of the server.

You can avoid work, not eat or drink, you can do nothing and you will survive this so called "dystopia". People NEED a drive otherwise the server will stagnate. People seem to forget the initial launch stagnated quite a bit before they had to pull the plug.

TL;DR​

Everything feels disconnected and isolated from each other. The CCA doesn't do much, the CPs are bog standard, maybe even sub-par, and patrolling is the most you'll see them do. Citizens work without incentive. Loyalism is not in. Housing is not in. Food and water is useless. Work rp for two weeks was a bad idea, but it had potential.

So, me and Beckett are the leads of CCA and deal with loyalism structure too. My character is usually the very visible, on the ground guys you see at workshifts and supply trains or sometime walking around the city where as Beckett’s is ur more Breen-type. The inner working of CCA are in a good place but I admit loyalism can be a bit confusing with the rewards starting at T3 but this is because at T3 you’re about the become a member of the loyalist party and so, you’re bestowed all these rewards. Alternately, me and Beckett are always open to suggestions and personally, I encourage any suggestion or criticism to the CCA and loyalism to be expressed, If I feel there are substantial complaints an area in faction information will be created for them to be visible to us.

I hope this clarifies and helps

 

[araskes]

Make an event team, get some people who are actually competent and can write events on board.

As for the global HL2RP situation. I do believe the ENGLISH version of HL2RP is dying. Disagree all you want, but I don’t think it’ll be the same as it was 5 years ago. Maybe S&Box will come along, maybe it won’t be like we suspect.

As for the age old dystopia argument and Nebulous. Nebulous is what I’d say is a fairly liberal server on their lore. Nebulous itself goes through cycles of activity, with some being extremely creative and awesome and others being boring text rp times such as the period when it was on C24 (as @Takyon3 pointed out)

I don’t think anyone wants a non-dystopic server. I’ve never heard anyone say that. What I do think people want is a server that is dystopic but not so blatantly boring that you just leave. “Pick up that can” and “ISOLATE” and “no, you can’t have scissors” or your malnourished. It’s lazy, it’s boring. Yet the setting can go so much further with periods of eldritch horror of an inter-deminisonal empire that has human elements essentially chipping away at itself.

tl;dr
Make the dystopian fun and interesting. Make an event team.

funny thing is, there is an event team.

 

[TheDeNuke]

funny thing is, there is an event team.

...and we are stuck in a gigantic pile of issues.

Mostly the fact that its currently impossible to add anyone outside of the staff team and nobody inside the staff team wants to run events apart from a select few.

 

[TheDeNuke]

For what its worth we have created a system of "campaigns" which involve:

World Goals
Secret World Goals (not in Beta)
Faction Goals
Secret Faction Goals
Opposition Goals (not in Beta)
Secret Opposition Goals (not in Beta)

Which when met will generally translate to events depending on outcomes at the end of the campaign period or earlier. The purpose of this system is to give players something to work towards and make it easier for the members of the staff team to come up with events rather then just pulling "antlion infestation" or "zombie invasion" out of their asses. Additionally, its designed for the purpose of giving players the freedom to make a impact on the city apart from just being micromanaged by the administration team and thus avoiding too many overly scripted events.

However, with the lack of event team staff and the other problem of admins not understanding this system, we have ran into some major issues in the past few days, but as @Imperator RAD-X has stated we are having a staff team meeting for the purpose of resolving some of these misunderstandings.

 

[Mullin]

I haven't been on the past few days due to being busy with a few other things; this isn't in regards of Takyon's post, more Sagsworth. Apologies that it happened, we've had to make a meeting, which is happening tonight, where staff are going to have to be there and we've also put a stopped to events until this is made more clear. Prior to this launch, we had staff evaluations and re-worked the staff-team from the ground up, we certainly did not neglect this and want to repeat V1 issues; we're hoping to nip this in the bud asap and get back to having fun on the beta again. So for now, all I can really request is put this behind us and move on because I promise we will not have something like this happen again, afterall, this is a beta and can you imagine if we launched like this? It would be V.1.2 not V2.

@Sagsworth

 

[Gazzpacho]

i have a solution to all of this
make adamcf an admin

shut upppp

 

[Fabulous]

And once CP's act, there is no limit (in time, tools or methods) they can use to retaliate. So yeah, try me, I welcome the challenge.

All the discussion aside, this tells something really bad about your mentality as a CP lead. I like to be uninvolved to this discussion but I'm pretty sure you as Senior Admin is supposed to respect the fact that there are legal and illegal factions on this server and even as a faction your goal is to provide and create roleplay in your own aspects, instead of challenging other factions. Pressing on one portion of people and responding to them with ''You havent seen pressure, just challenge us and we have no reason to not make you have even less fun on this server.'' is just.. really not a mentality that should be coming from an admin. In my humble opinion at least.

 

[Gr4Ss]

All the discussion aside, this tells something really bad about your mentality as a CP lead. I like to be uninvolved to this discussion but I'm pretty sure you as Senior Admin is supposed to respect the fact that there are legal and illegal factions on this server and even as a faction your goal is to provide and create roleplay in your own aspects, instead of challenging other factions. Pressing on one portion of people and responding to them with ''You havent seen pressure, just challenge us and we have no reason to not make you have even less fun on this server.'' is just.. really not a mentality that should be coming from an admin. In my humble opinion at least.

I give up.

Apply for CP lead if you want

 

[Gr4Ss]

@Sagsworth

Well todays event was pulled off on a whim, as me and a few other staff were talking about vorts not having caused enough terrorism, and so with the go ahead I went on my vort, got myself some frags and was gonna chuck a few at infrastructure to cause some chaos. Then @Gr4Ss comes up with the idea of firebombing the loyalist housing scaffolding which was *intended* to just hit the loyalist housing before it was complete. Player inaction led to the fire spreading to the CMU which lead to break off fires not caused by my vort in the CWU HQ and CCA building.

It had nothing to do with seeing a player auth for firebombing something and going "fuck it, can't wait for the players we'll do it ourselves!" And personally I had no idea there was a "no fires!" order going about among staff, and I had no idea you were planning something like this. This was just gonna be a case of a vort bombing some stuff for their faction goal, which turned into what it did because the players didn't do anything about the fire before it spread to the CMU. If they had the CMU, CWU and CCA fires may never have happened.

The whole dynamic of the two week event is for the "loyalist" side to get the district built and for the "resistance" side to stop it being built. Due to how the building mats were handled (needing 40 for a building and 40 coming in for the two trains a day), all buildings were almost complete, meaning the dynamic of the event was about to shift before a week had even passed, which is why things were so hectic. The burning of the loyalist housing was supposed to be a slowing measure so that other actions could be taken later on, without a massive shift to cleaning up the IZ and rebuilding that.

I'm sorry this messed with your plan, if I had known I would have gotten you in on it.

Just a few points from my side here:

1. CP's have had absolutely nothing happen to them for days. I literally cannot make the CP even more incompetent without purposely starting to have them make IC mistakes to give people a chance. Yet still we were steamrolling all factions and their objectives with so far the only serious threat to the CP objective having been the food riot.
2. People have been complaining about it being hard to get into the QZ since the forcefield went up. I was waiting for a Gonome to destroy it, but since we collapsed a tunnel in the QZ earlier yesterday and killed the gonome that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
3. This wasn't done willy nilly but some people who should be aware of things in the staff team were aware. Nobody told us to stop.
4. There was some purpose here in regards to the faction objectives (CP, CWU, Vort and by accident also CMU) where everyone agreed there is a major imbalance but nobody was fixing anything with time running out fast.
5. Deadline was even more tight with the final train set to arrive very soon.
6. We were running towards the end of high pop with nothing really having happened. Any later and we wouldn't have had enough CP's to deal with it (we actually already barely scraped by with the hands the 6 pair of hands we had)

In order to purposely screw my own faction over, I pointed Bodger right at our current giant enormous weakspot that I have left to exist for three days without anyone even trying to abuse it: the forcefield and crumbling wall to the QZ behind it/tunnel access with limited turret coverage (none actually after the gonome removed the last ones). Having the field go down was an idea actually already tossed into the staff chat the day it went up, but without ever being acted upon so players had a chance to do it.

The housing block here was intended to just be potential collateral damage. Everyone in the staff VC agreed that progress was going too fast and it'd be stupid of all buildings were completed with yesterday evening's train (which they would have been had this not happened). Nobody told me it was not OK if this building caught on fire.

And so it happened. Main fire on the forcefield, small fire on the scaffold. Except the response to the fire was so horrible I ended up burning down a lot more than I intended (although the minor setback for the CMU also helps solve another problem in regards to a faction rushing their progress).

The secondary fires (site admin building and CWU) I had nothing to do with.

 

[Takyon3]

Just a few points from my side here:

1. CP's have had absolutely nothing happen to them for days. I literally cannot make the CP even more incompetent without purposely starting to have them make IC mistakes to give people a chance. Yet still we were steamrolling all factions and their objectives with so far the only serious threat to the CP objective having been the food riot.

You still have this mentality that because you "steamroll" the other factions that you're doing a good job. Who even made you the CP lead? Atle?

 

[Gr4Ss]

You still have this mentality that because you "steamroll" the other factions that you're doing a good job. Who even made you the CP lead? Atle?

I'd love to see someone else do a better job